The silence that followed Eva's words was more terrifying than the roaring. It was the silence of a heart stopping mid-beat. That monster is Maya. The sentence hung in the polluted air, a verdict that condemned their past and obliterated their future.
Derek's mercury-sheened eyes were wide, the analytical sheen they'd gained in the Laboratory shattered by raw, human denial. "No," he breathed. It was the most honest sound he'd made in decades. He took a stumbling step forward, towards the building that was now groaning its death throes. "Maya!"
"Don't!" Eva's voice was a sharp crack of command, but it was too late. Derek was already running, his enhanced legs carrying him over the twisted, overgrown rubble, a desperate moth flying towards a flame that was consuming reality itself.
Leo, hauling Eva from the canal's edge, watched him go, a curse dying on his lips. Jordan stood his ground, the Umbralite katana held in a ready, neutral stance, his face a mask of recalculating probabilities. The primary threat had just been redefined. Wolfen remained where he was, a statue of indifference, though his eyes, those ancient, bored embers, were now fixed on the dissolving building with a faint, nascent spark of interest.
Derek reached the gaping maw where the wall had been. The air here was dead. No sound, no smell, not even the faint hum of background radiation that his enhanced senses had grown accustomed to. It was a pocket of absolute silence, a vacuum in the sensory world. He stepped inside.
The interior was a nightmare of negation. It was not a ruined office space; it was a negative photograph of one. Desks, chairs, and skeletal computer terminals were still present, but they were monochrome, their colors bleached away. Their edges were fuzzy, dissolving into the same fine, black dust that fell like silent snow from the ceiling. In the center of the vast, open floor stood Maya.
She was both utterly familiar and completely alien. Her form was hers, but it was wreathed in a shimmering, dark aura that made the air around her waver like a heat haze. Her hair was a void-black cascade, and her eyes were twin pools of the same absolute darkness. She stood with one hand placed gently on a support pillar, and where her fingers touched, the concrete was not cracking, but un-spooling, its molecular structure peacefully, quietly, coming apart.
"Maya?" Derek's voice was a hoarse whisper, swallowed by the oppressive silence.
She turned her head slowly. There was no recognition in the black pools of her eyes, only a placid, distant curiosity, like a scientist observing a mildly interesting specimen.
"Derek," she said. Her voice was the same, yet it was layered with a thousand whispering echoes, the sound of the thing she had consumed, the sound of the silent symphony in her head. "You are so loud. Your heart is a frantic drum. Your blood screams through your veins. It must be exhausting."
"Maya, stop this. Look at what you're doing! This isn't you! This is what they did to you!" He took a step forward, his hand outstretched, a plea from a lifetime ago.
A flicker of something—annoyance?—crossed her serene features. "They showed me the truth. The world is flawed. A chaotic, screaming mess of inefficient design. I am not 'doing' anything. I am… correcting. Imposing order. A beautiful, final silence."
She gestured vaguely with her free hand, and a filing cabinet to Derek's left simply ceased to be. It didn't topple or explode. One moment it was a rusted, tangible object, the next it was a cloud of black, odorless dust, settling gently on the floor.
"You're killing everything!" Derek shouted, the sound strangely muffled in the dead air.
"Killing is a noisy, messy concept," she replied, her head tilting. "I am… resolving. Turning the chaotic equation into a simple, elegant zero. It is a kindness."
Desperation clawed at Derek's throat. He tried to reach for the man he used to be, the one who had connected with Zane out of loneliness. "Maya, please. We're your friends. Leo, Jordan, Eva… we're here. We can help you. We can find a way back."
The name 'Eva' seemed to register differently. The placid surface of her expression rippled. "Eva tried to interfere. She is… loud. A different kind of loud. A persistent variable." Her black eyes focused on Derek with sudden, chilling intensity. "And you are becoming loud again, Derek. Please. Be still."
She took a step towards him, her hand lifting from the pillar. The moment the contact broke, the pillar sighed and collapsed inward on itself, becoming a mound of black sand.
Derek stood his ground, tears of frustration and grief welling in his alien eyes. "I won't let you do this."
Maya smiled then, a small, pitying smile. "You have no agency in this. You are a term in an equation I am simplifying."
She raised her hand, palm facing him. Derek felt a terrifying sensation, not of heat or cold, but of unraveling. The very atoms of his being felt like they were being gently, insistently pulled apart. He screamed, but the sound was stolen away by the silence. He was being edited out of existence.
From outside, Leo saw Derek's form begin to flicker, to lose cohesion. "He's not coming out!" he roared, and without a second thought, he plunged back into the filthy canal, using it as a trench to charge the building's flank, a battering ram of pure, desperate force.
Jordan, his logic engine processing the catastrophic failure of Derek's diplomatic approach, moved. He was a streak of motion, the Umbralite katana held low. He didn't enter through the front; he scaled the crumbling facade in seconds, swinging through a hole in the upper floor to get a tactical advantage.
Inside, as Derek felt his consciousness start to blur at the edges, a biopolymer-reinforced fist smashed through the wall next to Maya. Leo burst into the room, roaring, "Get away from him, Maya!"
The sudden, violent noise—a truly loud sound—seemed to physically pain her. She flinched, her concentration broken for a split second. Derek collapsed to the floor, gasping, whole but profoundly violated.
Maya turned her black gaze on Leo. "You are the loudest of all, Leonardo. All blunt force and unresolved anger." She gestured, and a wave of nothingness swept towards him. Leo braced, crossing his arms, but the effect wasn't kinetic. The biopolymer filaments in his arms began to vibrate at a catastrophic frequency, the bonds holding them together threatening to sever. He cried out, not in pain, but in the horror of feeling his own enhanced body turning against him.
From above, Jordan dropped. The Umbralite katana, a blade of absolute order, sliced down towards Maya's outstretched arm. It was the perfect, logical strike to disable the threat.
It never connected.
Maya didn't even look up. She simply raised her other hand, and the air around the katana thickened, becoming a syrup of entropic force. The black blade, which could cut through anything, suddenly found itself resisted. It wasn't a parry; it was the universe itself refusing its cut. Jordan hung in mid-air for a moment, straining against the impossible pressure, before he was flung back against a wall with a sickening crunch, the katana clattering from his grasp.
It had taken less than ten seconds. Derek was neutralized. Leo was being dismantled. Jordan was broken. They had all failed.
Through it all, Wolfen Welfric had watched from the street, his hands in his pockets. He had observed the emotional appeal, the frontal assault, the tactical strike. All of them, futile. He had seen Maya's power, not as destruction, but as a fundamental rewriting of local physics. It wasn't fire and brimstone; it was a quiet, absolute veto on existence itself.
And for the first time in a very, very long time, Wolfen Welfric smiled.
It was not a kind smile. It was the smile of a master chess player who has finally seen a move worth making.
He took a step forward. Then another. He didn't run. He walked, a slow, deliberate pace that carried an unimaginable weight. The dead air around the building seemed to recoil from him. The silent void Maya had created met the ancient, contained inferno of his being.
Maya, sensing a pressure far greater than anything she had yet encountered, released Leo, who slumped to the ground, his arms smoking and glitching. She turned fully to face the new arrival, her head tilted in genuine curiosity.
"You are… quiet," she said, her echoing voice laced with a hint of uncertainty. "But not a quiet I can resolve. You are a different kind of equation."
Wolfen didn't answer. He simply raised his own hand. And where Maya unleashed silence, Wolfen unleashed a single, focused point of creation.
Fire erupted. But it was not a wild, roaring blaze. It was a contained, geometric construct of pure white plasma, a perfect, rotating dodecahedron that hovered above his palm. It didn't radiate heat; it consumed it, pulling the warmth from the very air, countering Maya's entropic cold with a foundational force of the universe. It was the opposite of Umbralite: not the absence of light, but its absolute, concentrated source.
Maya's eyes widened. She thrust her hands forward, a wave of nullification sweeping towards him.
Wolfen met it with his fire. The two forces collided not with a bang, but with a sound that had no name—a tearing, screeching distortion of reality itself. The white fire and the black entropy warred in the space between them, a silent, apocalyptic struggle. The very fabric of the building groaned. Floors above them ceased to exist, not turning to dust, but simply vanishing into the conflict zone.
Then, Wolfen moved.
He became a blur of motion and controlled annihilation. He lunged, not at Maya, but at the space she occupied, his fist wreathed in Umbralite. She flowed away, her body disassembling the floor where she had stood a microsecond before. He pursued, and the building became their arena. They crashed through walls that turned to dust at Maya's touch and were met with shields of obsidian that Wolfen conjured from nothing.
It was a dance of opposites, a battle between two different visions of ultimate power: one that sought to simplify the universe into nothing, and one that could command the fundamental forces of matter and energy. They wrecked the place not with collateral damage, but with the direct application of their wills. A whole wing of the building was silently erased. Another was flash-forged into a labyrinth of jagged, black crystal.
Derek, Leo, and Jordan could only watch, helpless, from the ruins, as two of the Laboratory's most profound and terrible creations tried to unmake each other, their fight threatening to unravel the city block, and perhaps the very laws of physics holding their world together.